For the sake of the families

Together again . . . Hawra Al Aridhi, left, and her friend from Nauru, Zahrra, embrace on a hill overlooking their new home in Wellington, New Zealand. Ahmed and Bushra, Hawra's parents, are in the background. Photo: Jason South

New Zealand has created new lives for the refugees that Australia abandoned to the Pacific solution, writes Michael Gordon.

Only five months ago, Bushra Al Aridhi expected to die in the place she calls the jail - Australia's offshore processing centre on Nauru.

Today, she is pregnant with her second child and beginning a new life, with the husband she feared she would never see again, in a timber house overlooking Wellington Harbour in New Zealand's North Island. It's been a long journey from Baghdad.

Bushra and her daughter, Hawra, spent two years and three months on Nauru, detained under Australia's Pacific solution, a warning of what others might expect if they tried to to get into Australia illegally. Meanwhile, her husband, Ahmed, endured a miserable freedom in Brisbane; he had his liberty, having been granted refugee status and a temporary protection visa (TPV) by Australia, but under the Howard Government's hardline policy, he had no prospect of ever being reunited with his wife and daughter.

However, the Al Aridhis are among nine families being reunited in New Zealand by Prime Minister Helen Clark's Government at the request of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

While Australia has gone to extreme lengths to separate families in a bid to shut down the people-smuggling trade (denying, for example, any prospect of family reunion to those who came by boat after the Tampa), New Zealand has gone to extraordinary lengths to put families back together and give them a future.

Aside from the 131 asylum seekers New Zealand almost instantly accepted from the Tampa in 2001, it has quietly taken about 270 asylum seekers from Australia's offshore processing centres at Nauru and Manus Island.

They are being reunited with more than 360 immediate family members after New Zealand missions to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Reuniting refugee families represents one of the most ambitious, delicate, challenging and complex family reunion projects ever undertaken by New Zealand immigration,

The contrast between Australia and New Zealand was underscored yesterday by the UN commissioner, Ruud Lubbers, who told a gathering of refugees in New Zealand he would "talk again with the authorities in Australia to get free those who are on Nauru still [and] to get finally accepted as refugees those who are still there in detention centres". AHMED Al Aridhi, 40, left Iraq in November 1999 because he feared for his life. As he puts it, Saddam Hussein's regime "had trouble with me". He paid a people smuggler and went through Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia before the hazardous boat trip to Christmas Island.

He spent eight months in the Curtin Detention Centre before being released on a TPV.

His wife and daughter later followed his escape route from Iraq, stopping for a while in Iran, then using money he had earned as a mechanic in Brisbane to make the long trip to Australia. But their journey finished on Nauru.

Ahmed says he had a good employer and a good job in Brisbane, but tells how his wife's despair with life in Iran, where she suffered threats of forced return to Iraq and discrimination (their daughter could not attend school), took a heavy emotional toll. And things became worse on Nauru.

He could not concentrate, began losing tools and was a danger to himself and others. He was forced to switch to detailing cars. "All the time in Nauru, Bushra would be crying on the phone, saying, 'Please help me,' " he says. "My daughter would say, 'Why you send me to the jail?"'

Photographs taken on Nauru capture Bushra's despair. They show her sitting in the dirt in an extremely distressed state, pleading for help, with six-year-old Hawra trying to comfort her. They also show security guards preventing asylum seekers from leaving the camp through the front gate.

For Bushra and others interviewed by the Herald, Nauru became the jail for broken spirits. The stifling heat and lack of fresh water, combined with the numbing uncertainty and the regular disappointment of rejection, aged their bodies prematurely and twisted their minds.

"It was a horrible situation," says Sajjad Sarwari, who has been reunited with his brother Ali's family in Hamilton, south of Auckland. "We should not call Nauru a detention centre or a camp. It is a hellhole. I am really sorry for those who are still there, worried about them."

Latifa Ali, reunited with her husband, Jawed, in Hamilton, says the worst moments for young mothers were having to wait for a bucket of salt water to wash their babies, and being rejected for asylum - not once but twice - despite the fact that their husbands' claims had already been accepted.

Although, the Government insists the women were assessed and rejected as refugees according to the UNHCR's refugee test, the UNHCR has consistently argued that spouses and minor children of recognised refugees should be given refugee status.

The families brought together in New Zealand have not only had to recover from years of separation, but must reconcile themselves with past tragedies. Jawed Ali's father and older brother were killed by the Taliban before he was urged by his mother to escape. His mother and two other sons died after he left.

His wife, Latifa, suffered months of depression and illness on Nauru with their daughter, Firshta. In Melbourne, Jawed was so consumed by grief, hopelessness and guilt that he attempted to take his life.

In his rented home in Hamilton, Jawed explained how he and Latifa came to terms with their grief in the weeks after their reunion, resolving to look to the future. "We knew that too much thinking about that [the past] was bad [and] that if I continue this, my daughter's future can be dark."

The same sentiment was expressed by Rahima Hussaini, who was accepted by New Zealand with daughter Nida, but whose husband is still missing, feared killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. "I'm very happy," she says, though her face betrays deep sadness. "I know the future of my daughter is very good and she's not like me." Nida will have an education, freedom, security and choice. Rahima grew up with none of these things.

Each of the families expresses gratitude to New Zealand and Susan Harris Rimmer, the UNHCR official who put their case to the NZ Government. Bushra reveals that she has conceived since being reunited. The baby is due in six months and, if it is a girl, they will call it Susan.

She also pleads for New Zealand or Australia to take the others on Nauru, saying: "Please, finish the jail."

Ahmed says he would like to return to Australia to visit friends and thank those who employed and helped him during his three years in Brisbane, but not while the Howard Government is in power.

Though the couple will be entitled to New Zealand citizenship in three years and therefore be able to settle legally in Australia, they insist their loyalty will always be to New Zealand and their future is there. "This country has given me, my family, a new life, a good life," beams Bushra Al Aridhi. "Freedom! Freedom!"